This article appeared in the March 7, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni, 2024)

There is no polite way to talk about sexual assault. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is Rungano Nyoni’s follow-up to her debut black comedy, I Am Not a Witch (2017), about a Zambian girl named Shula who is accused of being a witch and then exploited for her abilities, before her community finally turns on her. Nyoni’s new film also centers on a protagonist named Shula: this time, it’s a young Zambian woman who encounters her Uncle Fred’s corpse late at night on her way home from a costume party; she is dressed as Missy Elliott from her famous 1997 video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” adding a dash of absurdity to it all. What follows appears at first to be a straightforward narrative of the funeral ceremonies for Fred, largely performed by his aunts and their daughters. But Nyoni disrupts the conventional structure of the plot through formal, narrative, and bodily leaks: houses flood, dreams unsettle, and tears pour, threatening to undo the characters’ reality and, by extension, ours as well.

These aberrations alert us to what the characters struggle to speak or comprehend through language: that Uncle Fred was a predator who sexually assaulted Shula and several other (if not all) of his nieces. Language, as Black feminist literary critic Hortense Spillers reminds us, contains the architecture of violence against Black women. In her seminal 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Spillers argues that violence against Black women emerged through discourse. By contriving into existence words and sentences that describe acts that would otherwise remain unspeakable, they were rendered doable. And just as the word became flesh, so to speak, so did legal discourse reduce Black women to be mere flesh, stripping them of their personhood, so that they can be perceived as “things” available for sexual exploitation with no access to language to resist or speak back.

Nyoni builds upon this argument in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl by emphasizing how it is the labor of women in the family that makes such transgressions of the flesh ordinary and expected. As such, Uncle Fred’s mourning sisters become a physically taxing presence (for both Shula and the viewer) in the film, as they arrange his funeral proceedings and enforce genuflections to his spirit with stern warnings and outright rebukes of those who do not fall in line. Compared to all their crying, crawling, and wailing, Shula’s ambiguous and calm demeanor comes off as downright rude to her family. When her aunties come to collect her from the hotel to which she has retreated, they note disapprovingly how dry her eyes and un-puffy her face look: visual evidence of her lack of grief. They drag her back into the family home to do domestic work in place of the labor of mourning. Along with the other women, Shula cooks for male relatives who lounge outdoors; she is also tasked with gathering the other “delinquent” women in the family who also appear ambiguous in their grief for Fred.

Nyoni uses melodrama to draw out the surrealism and dark comedy of a funeral. Early on, there is a blink-and-you-miss-it jump scare when the specter of Uncle Fred appears next to Shula’s car, covered in sanitary pads. Such moments, both funny and alarming, provide a kind of necessary relief. They prevent the film from being engulfed by the sorrow of assault and reveal the uneasy tension of being a survivor and maintaining one’s humanity: it is possible to laugh in the face of trauma. Neither is the film engulfed by the culture of silence that perpetuates sexual assault: the afterlives of Fred’s transgressions manifest through video diaries, phone calls, drunken confessions, whispers, and even a teary conversation in the kitchen, with all the aunties present. In this latter scene, we become aware that each of the young women affected by Fred’s actions did speak out. They found a way, despite the insurmountable difficulty of stringing words together to acknowledge the harm done against them, to communicate the unspeakable to their protectors. Nonetheless, the predator remained at large. The issue was not that they were silent—it was that they were not heard.

The film explores how the assault of young women becomes a means to preserve the sanctity of the middle-class family—it ensures that they do not grow up to be adversaries of the home. Fred’s widow, we learn, was trafficked to him at the age of 11 after becoming pregnant from rape, and gave birth to the first of their seven children when she was just 12.  She is blamed by his sisters for not doing enough to keep him happy and even accused of driving him to alcoholism. With the exception of Shula, the other women of the family cast her out, refuse her food, force her to sleep in the empty swimming pool, and even threaten to evict her. Men do not have to work too hard to maintain the patriarchal order when its fiercest foot soldiers are women. What use is language, solidarity, or even kinship, when your family is your enemy?

The Missy Elliott balloon jumpsuit that Shula wears in the film’s opening becomes a prophetic vision for her to complete. In Black culture across the diaspora, this image is iconic: Elliott, as a fat Black woman, aggressively doubled down on the fatphobia she experienced in the music industry by not only exaggerating her figure but also making it futuristic. She is not of this world, the video seemed to say; she will outlive the tired body politics that constrain Black women. In On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the costume becomes a model for Black feminist refusal. For Shula, it comes to signify an internal other—a self within that also exists outside and beyond one’s history of assault.

As the movie’s grammar begins to disintegrate—the dream sequences become more frequent, bodies become more animalistic, and the soundtrack becomes deafening—so too does Shula. In the film’s long, painful closing sequence, Fred’s family and that of his younger, poorer widow gather together for a ritual settling of scores: the wife is reprimanded for her failures as a spouse and ordered to pay up as recompense. As all this unfolds, Shula emerges with other survivors of the family and begins to scream. She channels the titular guinea fowl, a creature whose wails alert other animals of the presence of predators. This impolite, disruptive gesture is the only way she can embody refusal. Talking does nothing to predators and their allies; for Shula to speak back, she must utilize utterances beyond speech. No, reconciliation is not possible. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is ambivalent about what lies ahead for these survivors but allows them to take the first step: to vocally sound the alarm.

Ayanna Dozier (PhD) is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer working in performance, film, printmaking, and photography. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020), and is a professor of film studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.